Page 2014 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 24 October 1989
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Having moved from the private sector to a government office, I am often struck by the magnificent equipment, desks, ergonomic furniture and all the rest. I know how hard it is at times for an employer to be able to afford that and how few employers in this town are really getting rich off their workers. The overall aspect of the legislation suggests that we have a broad consensus in this town that bodes well for industrial harmony in both the short and the long term. But the question is whether unions should have preferential status in determining situations in workplaces that competent, organised, literate, articulate and informed workers might themselves want to organise. We must always be conscious that we should not impose the workplace values that may have already been chosen democratically and in an egalitarian manner by workers themselves.
To give a broad example, there might be a group of workers who have decided on a certain sort of clothing, a certain work practice, a certain type of equipment that they find safe. Where there is no objective evidence that it is not safe, I would suggest that it would be inappropriate for an involved union to come in and upset that safe and harmonious situation simply for the purpose of bringing in new standardised equipment.
Mr Berry: How do they do that?
MR COLLAERY: Well, there are often union pushers for the use of standardised types of equipment. I am certain that those union leaders who read these Hansard debates - and no doubt they all will; they are all very well informed and have very good service machinery now - will note these comments. I trust that in the early days of the working of this legislation, in whatever form it emerges, those points will be considered.
Mr Speaker, early in today's proceedings the Deputy Chief Minister, Mr Whalan, referred disparagingly to the Rally as some sort of remnant and rump group. But, as my colleague Dr Kinloch informed me, to be a sacred remnant is no odious description. At page 222, the Australian Encyclopaedia contains a potted version of the history of the Labor Party, and if there was a body that went through the vicissitudes of rumps, remnants, breakaways and all the rest, that was the Labor Party. I remind the Deputy Chief Minister that he may regret casting stones at the early teething problems of what, hopefully, will be a contributing, responsible, community party in the ACT. Mr Berry, of course, has a lot of work to do because some of his ladders still do not reach the highest floors in this town.
Mr Speaker, the final comments I have to make relate to the way in which the Australian Labor Party is set out in this encyclopaedia. It refers to its emergence by unionism and the values upon which unionism was built, including, of course, industrial accidents, unemployment insurance,
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